Increased Efficiency of Permit Review Process of the Office of Wastewater Management

About the Program

Category: Health (Best in Category)

Year: 2015

Suffolk County New York is approximately 912 square miles, with an estimated population of approximately 1.5 million (with 568,943 housing units) in 2013. Only 26 percent of Suffolk County homes are connected to a community sewage collection and treatment system capable of reducing nitrogen making our economic prosperity, public health and safety, and quality of life reliant on the permitting process within Suffolk County. Unfortunately, the process for a resident or business to obtain a wastewater (septic system) permit was much longer than desired with completion of review approximately six months for a commercial property and three months for a residential property, and with a typical initial backlog (delay) of four to six weeks before the review process could begin. The Suffolk County Executive’s Performance Management Team met with the Suffolk County Department of Health Services (SCDHS) and local Town Building Department representatives to discuss the need and options for improvement in this critical area. It was determined that the main cause of the extended timeline was due to the multiple iterations (rework) needed to complete and correct most of the applications that were being submitted. A vast majority of the process cycle time was spent simply waiting for the additional information that was requested by the County from the building professionals to complete their application review. To gain significant improvements in the overall process time, the need to educate and collaborate more effectively with the design professionals to improve the quality of their submissions was realized by “building quality into the process rather than inspecting it out.” Short and long term activities were established and implemented that enabled us to meet our goal of reducing the initial backlog and overall process cycle times by at least 50% on average for all commercial and residential applications.